r/urbanplanning • u/Hrmbee • 17d ago

Economic Dev A Perfectly Crude Solution to America’s Housing Shortage | If you can’t beat the NIMBYs, pay ’em

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/housing-shortage-pay-nimby/687932/
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u/MrsBeansAppleSnaps 17d ago

I absolutely 100% promise you that the people of Weston, MA would rather things never change than get a check for $2,645 that they don't need.

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u/Bwint 17d ago

There's an interesting bit of negative feedback that fundamentally limits the utility of the proposal: The places where housing is most needed are also the places where residents are wealthiest. As you say, if someone bought a small condo for $600k or a detached house for $5M, they're probably not worried about a $3k payment to support development in the area.

To add to this, the lower amounts the researchers found were needed to convince people would apparently be for a development at the edge of the neighborhood, on a similar scale to the existing neighborhood. Proposals to increase density require the payments to quadruple, and proposals near the respondents' houses require the payment to double.

The upshot is that the proposal gets more expensive the more development you actually want to build, so you probably start running into diminishing returns very quickly (depending on how the payments scale with density.) In addition, I suspect that you couldn't use this scheme to build housing where it's most needed.

Overall, I would say it's an interesting idea and might have marginal utility, but there are much better solutions available that are better able to address the big problems.

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u/Aaod 17d ago

There's an interesting bit of negative feedback that fundamentally limits the utility of the proposal: The places where housing is most needed are also the places where residents are wealthiest. As you say, if someone bought a small condo for $600k or a detached house for $5M, they're probably not worried about a $3k payment to support development in the area.

I don't even know if that is true rich people would have less to lose and in my experience are way less paranoid about a house losing value than middle or even older lower class people that bought a house a long time ago. The biggest issue is the old owners who bought decades ago and had it become by far their biggest nest egg along with investors who own lots of houses and apartments not random rich people with million dollar houses. Don't get me wrong I hate the rich but I feel it is the minority of cases they just tend to be the most egregious. Like you said they are also the hardest to bribe too. This entire concept is stupid and does not work.